Page 42 of Fated to the Alpha Warrior (The Wolf’s Forbidden Mate #1)

Kieran

I can’t stop smelling lilac and honey. Her scent still clings to my skin, invades my nostrils and lingers on my tongue. It’s a constant reminder of what I’ve lost.

No. What I threw away, as if it was nothing. As if she was nothing.

My wolf is inconsolable, alternating between howling in anguish and snarling at me in sheer rage. The bond between us and Aurora lashes with a pain that’s worse than ever before, shattered beyond belief. And it’s all my doing.

I should be heading southwest to Pack Diamond. That’s where Aurora must be going even now, since it’s the right choice. She wouldn’t let her personal issues get in the way of warning others about the fae threat. Not after everything she’s been through growing up without a pack because of them.

But something feels wrong about that path when I step toward it. The more I face toward Pack Diamond territory, the more unsettled my wolf becomes. He whines and tosses his head like an unruly horse. When I catch another whiff of her scent on the wind, it’s coming from the wrong direction.

East.

Doubling back to our campsite from last night, I shift into my wolf form and put my nose to the ground.

Her scent is still fresh here, mixed with the smell of our arousal.

The memory of her beneath me, around me, crying out my name as she came undone, how it felt to spill myself inside her… it makes my wolf whimper with longing.

So I follow her path down the road. At first it seems like she’s going toward Pack Diamond. Then I catch it: the trail diverges suddenly, going southeast.

Stopping in the middle of the diverging path, I try to figure out what she should want out east. There aren’t many packs that way for miles, and none of them are big enough to be of any interest to the fae. The only thing that way is…

No. She wouldn’t.

But even as the thought occurs to me, pain lances through my chest, sharp and direct, with intent.

It’s clearer than anything I’ve felt since the initial rejection.

Through our broken bond, I feel echoes of Aurora’s agony, intense despite the distance between us.

She’s hurting, desperate, and I know that it’s all my fault.

I take off running, following both her scent trail and the feeling in my chest. She’s hours ahead of me, but I’m faster in my wolf form than her bike can go on these winding roads. If I push myself to my limits I may reach her in time.

Before I can make it more than a few scant miles, a familiar howl cuts through the air. One of my father’s messengers races toward me, his gray fur matted with blood and his eyes wild with panic.

I’m forced to shift back to human form to hear his news. “The fae are attacking Pack Jade,” he says as soon as he’s shifted. “They came out of nowhere, dozens of them. Your father sent me to find you. He needs you to come home now and help defend the pack.”

My heart stops. Reaching through the dim pack bonds, I feel it: pain, fear, and fury. The pack faces an impossible threat, and few back home know how to fight the fae.

But Aurora is out there in pain and alone.

Everything in me freezes as I’m torn between two impossible choices. My pack needs me. My father is calling for my help, and despite everything, I know what that cost him. As future alpha, it’s my duty to step up and protect our people.

Aurora is my people too, though. If she goes through with breaking our bond, she could die. The pain I feel from her now is just the beginning. And even if she survives, I’ll lose her forever.

I can’t believe one choice I made five years ago has led to this.

One stupid, monumental, impossible choice.

My father speaks for what must be nearly an hour, striding back and forth onstage.

He turns to the elders to emphasize certain points, thrusting his finger into the air as he declares the need for the pack to expand territory into the west. I watch him without really seeing him, listen without really hearing, because inside me, everything has turned to ash.

She looked at me like I was the only man in the room. The only thing in the room at all. And for her—for little Aurora with her mismatched eyes and trembling mouth—I suppose that I was.

Not so little anymore, I think. The Aurora that I saw today, after two years away, was a woman. Still small, still young, but filled out in all the right places.

Inside me, my wolf paces and howls, snarls and snaps. He’s furious, so furious that he barely feels like a part of me at all. His pain is overwhelming, and he’s making sure that it’s my pain too.

But I can’t show it to anyone. The pack needs to see that I’m strong, capable, and unaffected by what just happened.

So I grit my teeth and clench my jaw, forcing myself to sit upright in the chair my father prepared for me, positioned on one side of the stage, where everyone can see me and judge me.

He wants them all to look, he says—to look at their future alpha and weigh him as either worthy or unworthy.

After the speech is over, some of the warriors raise concerns, which either the elders or my father, often both, answer.

I’m not expected to answer any question or be called on at all, which is a blessing, since the pain in my chest is so excruciating that my entire back has stuck to the chair from sweat.

I barely hear it as the meeting is called to a close—I only see it as my father walks off stage and heads toward the office he keeps in the back of the Great Hall, on the other side of the amphitheater.

As I get up, I have to hide how much it hurts me. Don’t flinch, don’t whine or whimper, don’t stumble or limp. When you’re the alpha’s son, you get certain messages from the time you’re young. In my case, my father made sure I knew one thing, and one thing above all else: weakness is not allowed.

If I skinned my knee, I was meant to silently bear it until my shifter healing kicked in.

When I broke an arm, he reset it himself, insisting I was old enough that it should heal fine.

And after he found me crying over my first breakup, he hit me with a switch until I could take a lashing without shedding a tear.

This pain is like nothing I’ve ever felt before in my life. It feels as if I’m bleeding out, but there are no open wounds. My chest aches so deeply that my skin feels cold and numb. My wolf is still stirred up, even almost two hours after it all went down, and my head pounds in time with my pulse.

Giving the elders a brief nod of acknowledgement as I head backstage, I take the hallway toward Cade’s study as fast as I can.

My entire body feels like it’s on fire now, and I’m both hot and cold at the same time.

The pain makes me feel weak, as if there’s something wrong with me, because surely my father wouldn’t have insisted I do it this way if he knew it would feel so awful.

“Dad…” I knock on the open door, then push it open, finding him sitting at his desk with a glass in one hand and an open bottle of whiskey in the other. “Do you have a minute to talk?”

His eyes flick up to me, and based on the hardness in their steel gray depths, my stomach sinks. Fuck, fuck, fuck. I know that look. This won’t end well for me. My wolf whines, and sick dread pools in my stomach.

“Just had to speak up, didn’t you?” Rising from his chair, he stalks up to me and yanks me into the room by my wrist. I stumble at his strength, just like I’m still the little kid he pushed around. “Close that door and face your maker, boy. You’re going to pay for what you did.”

Stoically, I push the door shut behind me and let all thoughts of having a calm discussion about this leave me.

I know what it means when he’s like this.

I was hoping that since the meeting went well, and he seemed so happy and invigorated on stage, that he’d be in a good mood.

But like so many other times, I was wrong.

“You never should’ve spoken up on stage.

” He shoves me into the overstuffed armchair opposite his desk and looms over me.

“It was for me to decide whether or not that misfit got to stay in the pack. Not for you. But you just had to open your mouth and speak anyway, didn’t you?

I thought you learned something from those other alphas in the past two years, boy. ”

“I learned a lot.” I can’t stop myself from pointing out, “Like that it makes an alpha look weak to exile someone so defenseless.”

He backhands me so hard that my head hits the headrest. Pain radiates from my cheek, and as I raise my fingers to it, I realize with a sense of sick dread that he cut me with his ring.

Turning my head to look at him, I take in the sneering curl of his lips, the glint of his wolfsbane ring from the overhead. It’ll give me a permanent scar, one I realize by probing with my fingers will stretch from my jaw to just under my eye.

My father came perilously close to half-blinding me just now.

Snarling, the wolf in me rises up, insisting we could tear his throat out. We could, I have no doubt of it, but there’s no telling what would come after. And based on the look on his face, he’s more than capable of fighting back. He might even welcome it if I took the first step.

With a sick sense of dread, I realize that I made a mistake today.

I should’ve allowed Cade to publicly exile Aurora, instead of stepping in to suggest she stay part of the pack.

Maybe if I’d let him take his anger out on her in a harmless way, she could’ve struck out on her own and found allies and protectors among the exiled shifters of society.

Or even found another pack to take her in.

But I just had to keep her close to me. My stomach churns at the realization that I’ve doomed her just as much as I’ve doomed myself. My wolf paces back and forth, anxious and on edge, desperate to go to her and protect her.